There is a need to convert ultra-high speed optical data streams, for example, optical data at rates greater than about 100 Gbits/sec, into workable electrical data. At data rates greater than 100 Gbits/sec, electrical loss and dispersion of the data signal distort the data thereby reducing performance. Current approaches involve high data rate connectors that increase the cost of the equipment significantly.
More specifically, increasing interest in serial bit rates exceeding 100-Gbit/s for next-generation Ethernet applications requires electronically multiplexed (ETDM) transmitters and receivers operating at 100 Gbit/s and above. At 107 Gbit/s, ETDM transmitters (See, e.g., P. J. Winzer, et al.,“107-Gb/s Optical Signal Generation using Electronic Time-Division Multiplexing”, IEEE JLT, Vol.24, pp.3107-3113, '06) and receivers (See, e.g., C. Schubert, et al., “107 Gbit/s Transmission Using an Integrated ETDM Receiver,” ECOC 2006, Tu1.5.5, September 2006) as well as full ETDM systems (See, e.g., K. Schuh, et al., “100 Gbit/s ETDM transmission system based on We3. P. 124, ECOC'06) have recently been demonstrated using the binary on/off keying (OOK) format. However, both reported ETDM receivers employed a separately packaged photodiode and electronic demultiplexer. When designing ETDM receivers for commercial 100-Gbit/s applications and above, electrical signal transmission between photodetector and demultiplexer is problematic due to reduced performance resulting from microwave signal integrity issues. In fact, electro-optic packaging complexity at this data rate is one of the reasons for the recent push towards optical DQPSK architectures for 100 G systems (See, e.g., P. Winzer, G. Raybon, et al., “10×107-Gb/s NRZ-DQPSK transmission at 1.0 b/s/Hz over 12×100 km including 6 optical routing nodes,” to be published ECOC 2007).